MemShrink progress, week 109–112

There’s been a lot of focus on B2G memory consumption in the past four weeks. Indeed, of the 38 MemShrink bugs fixed in that time, a clear majority of them relate in some way to B2G.

In particular, Justin Lebar, Kyle Huey and Andrew McCreight have done a ton of important work tracking down leaks in both Gecko and Gaia. Many of these have been reported by B2G partner companies doing stress testing such as opening and closing apps 100s or 1000s of times over long period. Some examples (including three MemShrink P1s) are here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. There are still some P1s remaining (e.g. here, here, here). This work is painstaking and requires lots of futzing around with low-level tools such as the GC/CC logs, unfortunately.

I don’t think so. AIUI, most of the problems were in JS code in Gaia (B2G’s UI) or in IPC code that isn’t exercised on desktop because it’s single process. Well, it’s possible some of the latter might help if/when e10s goes forward.